Friday, December 30, 2011

Airport Security

If you don't read Boing Boing, you should. It's a geeky but entertainingly readable science blog.

I could point you to many articles, but since I travel frequently I am particularly interested in what security guru Bruce Schneier calls "Security Theater." Here's the latest:

To walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier is to see how much change a trillion dollars can wreak. So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost. And directed against a threat that, by any objective standard, is quite modest. Since 9/11, Islamic terrorists have killed just 17 people on American soil, all but four of them victims of an army major turned fanatic who shot fellow soldiers in a rampage at Fort Hood. (The other four were killed by lone-wolf assassins.) During that same period, 200 times as many Americans drowned in their bathtubs. Still more were killed by driving their cars into deer. The best memorial to the victims of 9/11, in Schneier’s view, would be to forget most of the “lessons” of 9/11.

Before you deluge me with comments to the effect that the lack of deaths PROVES that our counter terrorism efforts are working, you should read the whole article.